Glossary of terms

Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE): A measure of the value of media coverage by comparing it to the cost of a similar placement were it an advertisement. Most of today's PR theorists see limitations with AVE as a metric.

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Circulation: The number of copies it distributes on an average day.

Clip or Clipping: A story cut from a publication or a segment cut from a video or audiotape

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Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR): The movement of corporations, organizations and businesses to pursue not only profit objectives, but also objectives that advance a social or public good. Typically CSR refers to the efforts of companies to become sustainable, eco-friendly and "green". CSR also refers to being ethical and transparent in accounting and financial practices. The CSR movement reflects a growing cultural belief that corporations should not only focus on profitability but encourage a "triple bottom line": people, planet, and profits. (see "Triple Bottom Line" on Wikipedia)

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Cost per impression (CPI), or Cost per thousand impression (CPM): The cost of traditional advertising or internet marketing or email advertising campaigns, where advertisers pay each time an ad is displayed

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Crisis Communications: The type of communications that organizations use when experiencing a crisis. It is differentiated from the ordinary communications messages put out by the organization.

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Frequency: Measures the number of times (within a specific period) an audience potentially receives a message.

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Influence: PR academics attempt to quantify and measure the number of people within a relevant public who are inspired to act as a result of the charisma, authoritativeness, desirability, likability, power, affluence or popularity of an individual, brand, business or organization. Web startups like Klout.Com are devising means to use social media to better quantify influence. Influence is distinguished from reach in that the former must include an observable action on the part of the receiver.

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Media type: Elements of the mass media that focus on delivering news to the general public or a target public. These include print media (newspapers, magazines), broadcast news (radio and television), and Internet (online newspapers, news blogs, etc.).

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Opportunities To See (OTS): Though limited, held by PR professionals as a better evaluative measure than pure impressions. OTS/OTH refer to a more realistic measure of how many people in a target audience actually had the opportunity to see (or hear, in the case of a TV/radio/podcast broadcast) a communications or media message. Whereas "impressions" is a raw number of how many times a message was delivered to some channel, Opportunity to See attempts to define exactly how many of those impressions represented an actual possibility of a person to see/hear them.

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Page Views or Page Impression: The request to load a single web page of an Internet site.

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Press Release: A news announcement, usually put out by a representative of an organization, that features a new development, product, service or other event of historical or reputation importance for the organization.

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Public Relations: The practice of producing publicity (excluding promotional materials and paid advertising, which typically fall under the purview of Marketing); managing media relations and communications (typically among members of the Fourth Estate); and managing reputation

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QR Code: A graphical image that encodes data which can be scanned using a mobile device. When the image is scanned, the encoded message is decoded and able to be read by the user. QR codes can encode URL, contact, or text information. They can also encode SMS data which can be sent to other mobile devices.

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Reach: A measure of the number of persons who viewed a communication object. For example, a print publication with a circulation of 132,000 is a representation of its "reach'.

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Return on Investment (ROI): A calculation that determines the amount of money a particular campaign, ad placement, media buy or other communications spend produced. ROI Calculation

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Share of Voice: A brand's or group of brands' advertising weight expressed as a percentage of a defined total market or market segment in a given time period. The weight is usually defined in terms of expenditure, ratings, pages, poster sites etc.

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Tonality: A PR term that tries to capture the intersection of sentiment and influence. For example, the tonality of responses to a news piece can be positive, negative or neutral.

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Visitors: The number of distinct individuals requesting pages from the website during a given period, regardless of how often they visit.